The Unpaid Intern, Legal or Not

I thought this article would be beneficial to the many who are pursuing an internship. Interns should know their rights and that most of the time, if working for for-profit company, they should be paid.

It would be interesting to see a breakdown by major and industry. For instance, how many computer science majors do unpaid internships? How many film studies graduates?<p>One of the best things about a CS major is that it enables you to enter the workforce in a high-value way. Some people would argue that it limits you later, that you become a technical resource without a business background, but I disagree completely. You get incredible exposure to business through software projects. And if you don't (ie., they hide their programmers off in a cubicle farm somewhere), it's probably not the kind of company you'd want to be working for anyway (nor is it a company likely to be producing good software).<p>I don't want to be too hard on college students/grads who are struggling, and I find the trend toward <i>paying</i> for work experience to be kind of disturbing. But can we expect students to make an effort to acquire skills that employers will pay for?

I spent a couple years of my errant youth in the entertainment industry, where unpaid internships are the standard way to enter the business. But those jobs aren't worth anything like a minimum wage to the employers, so if they weren't unpaid, the jobs simply wouldn't exist. For people looking to get a job in the industry after graduation, their best shot is to get an internship in college, do a great job and meet lots of people, and parlay that into an offer. Those "vulnerable" young people should be the first to object to a crackdown on unpaid internships.

This article makes me think of a previous article discussed on HN: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406328" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406328</a><p>There were quite a few comments supporting working for free/on spec. I have to wonder if we'll hear any talk about "your existing business model is disappearing" or "you're being disrupted" or "This is a huge opportunity for anyone trying to break into the business - college kids, amateur designers, the unestablished."

I see these articles constantly, and wonder which interns <i>don't</i> know that they should be paid. Unpaid internships are next to nonexistent in my major at my school.

Why are we seeing this article a year after it was published?